Botty love
50 best movie robots of all time including D.A.R.Y.L, Eve VII, the Cylons, Daft Punk, Max, Box, but not Daleks, obviously.
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But offstage, a vicious love triangle and Jughead’s eating disorder threatened to tear the band apart…
Hailing from wholesome Riverdale, USA, The Archies were a fresh-faced gang of teens who rocketed to the top of the pops. Listen to their first album on ArchieComics.com now!
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Wal Mart flip flops cause nasty chemical burn
Kerry bought some flip flops for $2.44 at Wal Mart. After wearing them for a while, she noticed a tingling sensation on her feet. She immediately stopped wearing the flip flops. Soon after, her skin turned red and blistery.
When she took the matter up with Wal Mart, they told her to take it up with the Chinese manufacturer.
Apparently, Wal Mart is still selling the flip flops.
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Gamer kidnapped, ordered at gunpoint to release his password
An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world’s top RPG gamers after one criminal’s girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google’s social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim’s head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better.
According to the police, the captive is the world leader in GunBound, a turn-based RPG-style multiplayer online game. Developed in South Korea, in this artillery game you get more experience points, offensive and defensive capabilities depending on your skills during battle, as well as money to buy more weapons, armor and all kinds of gear for your multiple avatars. You can only play with one of your avatars each time, but all of them belong to a single account.
The game looks to be quite popular, so the four gangsters decided they could make some quick cash if they kidnapped him to steal his user. Their plan: use one of the criminal’s girlfriends, called Tamires, to get him into a date using Google’s online social network Orkut, which is also extremely popular in Brazil. After contacting and seducing him, she told the GunBound wizard to meet her in a shopping mall.
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Giant rice paddy art
Pink Tentacle describes the practice of growing giant rice-paddy illustrations “by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety.” There’s a fantastic gallery of these illustrations, ranging from “36 Views of Mount Fuji” to various demons, gods and traditional illustrations, as well as the Mona Lisa.
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Brits reject copyright term extension for music!
Reuters is reporting that the British government has rejected a proposal to extend music recording copyrights from 50 to 95 years. Virtually all music is out of print in at 50 years, and extending copyright for another 45 years would only ensure that the vast majority of British recordings were long vanished and forgotten before they returned to the public domain. Economists calculated the net present value of the 95th year of copyright at less than the net present worth of a lottery ticket — so the government would do more for the average recording artist if they bought her a lotto ticket than if they gave her 45 years more copyright.
This is the first time that I know of, in the history of the world, that any country has given up on extended copyright terms. In the US, the Supreme Court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright were “orphans” with no visible owner and no way to clear them and bring them back into the world. Extending copyright dooms nearly every author’s life’s work to obscurity and disappearance, in order to make a few more pennies for the tiny minority of millionaire artists like Cliff Richards (and billionaires like Paul McCartney).
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Dead frog with a webserver can be controlled over the net
The Experiments in Galvanism frog floats in mineral oil, a webserver installed it its guts, with wires into its muscle groups. You can access the frog over the network and send it galvanic signals that get it to kick its limbs.
Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog specimen. Akin to Damien Hirst’s bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera.
– Risa Horowitz
Garnet Hertz has implanted a miniature webserver in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container of mineral oil, an inert liquid that does not conduct electricity. The frog is viewable on the Internet, and on the computer monitor across the room, through a webcam placed on the wall of the gallery. Through an Ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani’s original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal.
Experiments in Galvanism is both a reference to the origins of electricity, one of the earliest new media, and, through Galvani’s discovery that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, a nod to what many theorists and practitioners consider to be the new new media: bio(tech) art.
– Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz
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Five-toed athletic sandals for barefoot comfort
Vibram Fivefingers are outdoor sandals with individual toes. Wearing them is said to mimic the feeling of going barefoot, without the blisters and no-shoes/no-service hassles. They’re certainly cool-looking!
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Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: illustrated history of Tokyo’s lightspeed subcultures
Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is a riotously illustrated history of schoolgirl fashion in Japan, starting with the thousand-strong, razor-wielding biker gangs, all the way up to the cuddly, explosion -in- a- crafter- factory world of decora girls, who cover their fuzzy one-piece character pyjamas with stuffed animals and cute crafted whatsises. The book is packed with telling little anaecdotes about the cultural conditions that gave rise to each subculture, along with fashion tips, interviews with fashion pioneers, and some of the secret histories, including the rise and fall of the mad fashion pioneer who invented gonguru — Japanese hipster blackface. From Gothic Lolita’s creation of an entirely fictional style of “historical” dress to the scandalous sex-rings of the kogals (and the hysterical media circus that followed them), Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is an incredibly engrossing tour through lightspeed subculture.
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The revolution will be hard-bound and highlighted
"The [textbook] industry charges outrageous prices for new textbooks while simultaneously doing everything it can to make older versions unusable or obsolete. There is simply no reason that a new calulus textbook should cost $157. The study of calculus, at least the type of calculus that most of us need to study in high school or undergraduate programs, has not changed significantly in decades." – Textbook Revolution.
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Welcome To The Top of Europe
The Sphinx Observatory atop the Jungfraujoch in the Swiss alps is one of the most amazing man-made objects I’ve ever seen. A UNESCO world-heritage site, it holds the distinction of being the highest (in altitude) structure in all of Europe. Approachable by a train that runs inside the mountain (via a tunnel dug between 1896 & 1926 at the cost of a small fortune, not to mention many lives), the Observatory rests atop a glacier which has been hollowed out to feature a year round gallery of never-melting ice scultptures (glacial ice is spectacularly pretty), and an elevator up to the research station.
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Carey on
Drew Carey – coming on down. Drew Carey announced on Letterman last night that he will be the next host of The Price Is Right. Begin crafting your "Florida Loves Drew" shirts now.
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Holding Out for a Hero
Quite an entrance. pretty damn amazing performance at the Miss Black America 2001 drag show / pageant.
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Faceoff
Faceoff — the three founders of college social networking site ConnectU have accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their business plan and code. Tomorrow they face-off in a Boston courtroom. "It’s a mélange of gossip about upper-crust Silicon Valley, allegations of old-school Ivy League skulduggery and an oddball cast of characters that ranges from precocious dot-com millionaires to aspiring Olympic athletes. In what other intellectual-property lawsuit are two of the plaintiffs a set of Harvard University-educated twins from Greenwich, Conn., with several international rowing championship medals under their belts? …Despite the backstory’s semblance to screenplay fodder, the outcome is anything but scripted, at least for now."
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Fate: 1 Internets: 0
Newsfilter: 30,000 customers in the San Francisco area lost power today at about 1:50pm PDT, in a series of power failures which knocked out a major datacenter hub: 365 Main. The hub controls servers for many social media sites, including Technorati, Netflix, Yelp, Craigslist and all Six Apart properties, including TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. (6A’s twitter stream has updates.) More here and here.
Amusingly enough, 365 Main tempted fate and released a press release today patting themselves on the back for "two years of 100-percent uptime".
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Kinder Surprise
Kinder Morgan oil pipeline ruptured near Vancouver, British Columbia Thick, black oil dripped from lampposts, splattered across suburban lawns and crept into Burrard Inlet after a geyser of crude spewed from a burst Kinder Morgan pipeline Tuesday. [google news]
Work crews ripped into the TransMountain pipeline about 12:30 p.m., causing the oil to "explode," as one witness put it, from the ground and burble up from manholes, pouring down streets toward the ocean, according to witnesses.
Kinder Morgan bought the pipeline from a Canadian utility in 2005, and is known as a "poster child for pipeline problems."
More Kinder Morgan accidents.
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The Theiving Magpie: Jimmy Page’s Dubious Recording Legacy
The Theiving Magpie: Jimmy Page’s Dubious Recording Legacy
MUSICIAN: I understand “Dazed and Confused” was originally a song by Jake Holmes. Is that true?
PAGE: [Sourly] I don’t know. I don’t know. [Inhaling] I don’t know about all that.
MUSICIAN: Do you remember the process of writing that song?
PAGE: Well, I did that with the Yardbirds originally…. The Yardbirds were such a good band for a guitarist to play in that I came up with a lot of riffs and ideas out of that, and I employed quite a lot of those in the early Zeppelin stuff.
MUSICIAN: But Jake Holmes, a successful jingle writer in New York, claims (pdf) on his 1967 record that he wrote the original song.
PAGE: Hmm. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I’d rather not get into it because I don’t know all the circumstances. What’s he got, The riff or whatever? Because Robert wrote some of the lyrics for that on the album. But he was only listening to…we extended it from the one that we were playing with the Yardbirds.
MUSICIAN: Did you bring it into the Yardbirds?
PAGE: No, I think we played it ’round a sort of melody line or something that Keith [Relf] had. So I don’t know. I haven’t heard Jake Holmes so I don’t know what it’s all about anyway. Usually my riffs are pretty damn original [laughs] What can I say?
Hm, defensive much? Sure, by the time Zeppelin came along, the practice of ‘borrowing’ from obscure blues sources was well enshrined in British rock. (Though some were good enough to acknowledge their debt) But taking it a step further, and even apart from the above, Page was more than content to crib notes off of his immediate peers (bowed guitar at 1:40) , as well.
(grain of salt not included)
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CBC posts Dr Who episodes (streams only, geo-crippled, boo!)
The CBC has put episodes of the current Doctor Who series online streamed in flash. It’s a pretty major step as it means not Windows Media, and the only restrictions are geofencing. Episodes go online the day after broadcast, and will be there for a 4-week period to let people catch up on the series. Too bad it wasn’t 13 weeks to cover the whole series, but it’s still a giant leap forward.”
Also too bad that:
* It’s streaming, not download: the CBC doesn’t stop you recording the TV shows they transmit, but they stop you recording the shows they webcast. Why should one be different from the other?
* I can’t see it, because I’m using an IP address outside of Canada. The CBC broadcasts all its programming to all antennas, north and south of the US border.
It’s a bummer to consider a future in which broadcasts — which we can all see and record — are replaced with geo-locked, streaming crippleware netcasts. Hard to understand how that serves the public interest, something that the CBC, a tax-supported institution, is required to do.
I spoke with a friend at the CBC, and he was very sympathetic to my concerns. The BBC — producers of Dr Who — insisted on the region-locking and streaming only, as well as the four-week window (significantly, this is a much better deal than the BBC gives to Britons, who are required by law to pay a hefty annual fee to support the BBC — they only get seven days to see old episodes, and have to use a DRM-crippled product called iPlayer that only runs on Windows).
The bottom line seems to be that the CBC can’t afford to buy the right to just put downloads of Dr Who online from the BBC, even if the BBC could be convinced to sell them.
But at the end of the day, both the CBC and the BBC are public service organizations, charged with making material of public value. They are supported through tax (the CBC) and license fees (the BBC), and it’s tawdry for them to devote all this energy to locking away their media from one another. The BBC turns over a paltry five percent of its annual budget through licensing deals like this one — imagine how much benefit the Beeb could get by saying to the CBC, “Give us all your programs and you can have all of ours.” Is that enormous vault of programming worth more than the shows that a fraction of five percent of the BBC’s budget can produce?
This is how Internet exchanges work — ISPs don’t generally charge each other for the bits they exchange: Rogers doesn’t charge Aliant for the bits it sends to Rogers customers, and Aliant doesn’t charge Rogers for the bits its users send to Rogers customers. They’re “peers,” so they just send bits back and forth freely.
Virtually every country in the world has a state-funded public service broadcaster, all of them charged with the same mission: promote the public interest through programs with public value. They’re all on the same side — why isn’t their media? It’s time for public service broadcasters to peer with one another — to create an interlibrary loan system for public media.
All that said: top marks to the first person to demonstrate a working, reliable solution for watching and recording the CBC Dr Who episodes from anywhere in the world.
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NYC has Ugly People, Too
I’m tired of looking at attractive, fashionable people.. Behold: Ugly Outfits New York.
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Sumo Volleyball
Sumo Volleyball – online competition at its finest. For those of you who used to have ICQ, this game will be very familiar. Four different variates of play are offered. 1 on 1 is by far the favorite and the most fun, IMHO. One tiny downside, activeX based, and thus, pretty much IE only. There are also other games via the home page, of which Kung-fu chess is also very popular.
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Hey Mom And Dad, Leave Those Kids Alone!
Leave Those Kids Alone. The idea that parents should be engaging in play with their children is a modern concept (and not necessarily a good one, according to anthropologist David Lancy).
RobDurdle.com 
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